world to reveal what lies beneath: the clutter is the starting point; it is, in ontological terms, foundational.
It is sensible to lay down a couple of pre-emptive markers about where this leaves critical digital scholarship. The first is that it does not justify amnesia: no phenomenologist going back to Heidegger and Husserl would suggest that the primacy of experience means we just have to accept it as we find ourselves forever thrown into it. Morality is baked into thrownness and into our mutual thrownness with others; there is an imperative to take responsibility for it and its consequences, and part of that involves the forensic piecing together of what it means to be, to find oneself already out there in the thick of things as an opening gambit, and how that changes over time (see Hofman 2016).1 This pushes us to think about our contemporary situation in terms beyond a cost-benefit analysis of what digitization has given us and what it has taken away. If the grounding of existence has shifted, then we need new ways of assessing what it means to live well. Philosophers have long argued, for instance, that the ethics of our relationships with distant others is contingent not on our knowledge about them, but just on that basic fact of co-existence. What does that mean in a context where we have an awareness of all those others who are out there, but on the whole only in a minimal, generic form? The same can be said of digital literacy, of the claims so often heard that digital ethics depends on individuals’ knowledge of the techniques and technologies that provide the basis of the stuff they consume – not to mention the workings of media economics and the profound significance of digital infrastructures. It will be argued instead that we would be better served, ethically speaking, by starting with the affordances and constraints that come with an existence spent navigating those systems, usually by feel alone. ‘Feel’ is not quite the same thing as intuition or gut instinct, cleaving more closely to Bourdieu’s sens pratique.2 As he describes it, subjects are:
not particles subject to mechanical forces, and acting under the constraint of causes: nor are they conscious and knowing subjects acting with full knowledge of the facts, as champions of rational action theory believe … (they are) active and knowing agents endowed with a practical sense that is an acquired system of preferences, of principles, of vision and … schemes of action. (Bourdieu 1988: 25)
If not through conscious knowledge, then, how do digital scholars and users – existers, in Lagerkvist’s (2017) coinage – access that primary, generative experience of being amongst the digital? Historically one of the most persuasive ways has been through disruption: only when a tool is broken does its ready-to-handness become consciously registrable, and only when media are unexpectedly inaccessible does their sheer givenness become conceivable. Justin Clemens and Adam Nash (2018) helpfully tease this out by way of Giorgio Agamben’s conception of phenomenological anxiety, which goes far beyond occasional breakages and blockages to the annihilation of handiness itself – that is the only means we have of grasping the sheer contingency of our taken-for-granted everyday lives.3 By contrast, a common thread of this book is that the apprehension of contingency is rarely, if ever, revelatory, but rather a background hum that accompanies the improvisatory, provisional acts we engage in to sustain at-handedness and at-homeness. Shaun Moores (2015), and by extension David Seamon (1979) and Yi-Fu Tuan (1977), loom large here, in the evocative notion of a life lived alongly. But in addition to finding ontological security on the fly, constantly in motion from one digital thing to the next, that movement also affords the anxiety that is a necessary condition of care in the phenomenological sense; that is, of our having an interest in our own being. Clemens and Nash push this one step further in positing that if ontological care is temporal, and technology is fundamental in establishing the world as world, then what is technically possible and how we think of being are themselves co-determinate, stretching back in a chain to the ancient Greeks and before that to the development of writing.4
The originary technicity of being means that only that which appears as ready-to-hand can appear at all; there is nothing outside of graspability as a resource in an environment whose affordances are given by the history of technology.5 There is something a little maddening about the insistence that the sum total of what is imaginable is enframed by technology, but this is in effect no different from Foucault’s conjecture (1990 [1976]) that we have no means of understanding the self beyond the discourses of which we are products – or, less dispiritingly, there are no authentic selves to be discovered and protected from exogenous forces, only ways of selfing that can be scrutinized or nourished. There is then a continuity between the emphasis placed by Sarah Kember and Joanna Zyelinska (2012; see also van Dijck 2013; van Zoonen 2013) on the simultaneously generative and constraining nature of social media platforms and Michel de Certeau’s conception of everyday existence as imposition and affordance. It is always both. We can criticize Instagram on grounds of privacy, or commodification, or its entrenchment of narrowly unimaginative lifestyles, but only by way of selves predicated on intuitively grasped practices that are the product of a world in which Instagram is a thing, regardless of whether you or I use it or not. At the same time, though, navigating a world in which Instagram and its attendant cultures of practice are at hand to others and potentially to oneself is capable of sustaining that anxiety, phenomenologically speaking, that in turn makes it possible to understand, strictly defined, the utter contingency of the experience of social media. It is reasonable enough to suspect that digital media are designed to occlude the way they shape our experience of the world (Burke 2019), but understanding the latter is not a matter of standing back in order to get some perspective – it is a matter of diving in.
There is a worryingly heroic aspect to Heidegger’s notion of standing in a situation, grasping the nettle and taking responsibility for the self and world one finds oneself thrown into, which is questionable at best. But it is important that the ethical imperative he develops out of the condition of thrownness, which is built around the idea of fallingness from being, is not necessarily a redemptive one. The ins and outs of this ethics are for another chapter; for now what is important is that from a phenomenological perspective there is no point in trying to regain any kind of lost innocence associated with the pre-digital world, or in trying to attain a purer kind of being-in-the-world less contaminated by data. Fallingness and the alienation that goes along with it is a given; it is not just our default mode of experience but ontologically foundational. And that is what makes it possible to think of the kinds of states we often associate with digital media use – distraction, impatience, banal curiosity, affect-chasing – as starting points, not aberrations. Rather than accepting whatever compromised present we are served with, this simply means that there is no original sin for which we have to make amends. The ethics of digital media is not about atoning for what it has done to us, but about recognizing that the digital has always been within us, and we have always been within it. It is probably easier to think of the ethics of mutual constitutivity in the realm of relations between human subjects, and Emmanuel Levinas has been put to good use (see especially Pinchevski 2005a) in showing how ethics consists in the brute fact of co-existence, and not the intimate or attentive relations with specific others that may develop over time. Clemens and Nash similarly deploy Gilbert Simondon’s (2017 [1958]) model of the pre-individual6 to illustrate that individuation is anything but the emergence of discrete being: individuals exist in a perpetual, generative state of mutual transduction, and the same can be said of humans and their environments. The debate goes on about whether digital ontology is categorically novel, but the meaning of digital ethics is not built on shakier, more tainted ground than anything that came before. This is why arguments based on the intractability and unknowability of data, while useful framing devices, can only take us so far – the radical contingencies of the already-there world have always been constitutive of collective being-in-the-world and individual subjectivity in ways that cannot be made the objects of direct consciousness. They are, however, ready-to-hand, and their doing discloses a world of possibilities as well as strictures.
How then are we to think critically about digital life? There are countless concrete phenomena that demand to be called out as unethical: discriminatory usage of health data in the insurance industry, the prevention of the use of non-proprietary software and of autonomous infrastructural maintenance, the rolling out of AI-driven identification algorithms as non-optional standards, data surveillance carried out across ever-expanding
